سوابق مبتنی بر مولفه: یک روش جدید برای ضبط کار طراحی معامله

The growing pressures from global competitive markets signal the inevitable challenge for companies to rapidly design and develop new successful products. To continually improve design quality and efficiency, companies must consider how to speed design processes, minimise human-errors, avoid unnecessary iterations, and sustain knowledge embedded in the design process. All of these issues strongly concern one topic: how to make and exploit records of design activities. Using process modelling ideas, this paper introduces a new method called component-based records, in place of traditional design reports. The proposed method records transaction elements of the actual design processes undertaken in a design episode, which aims to continually improve design quality and efficiency, reduce designers’ workload for routine tasks, and sustain competitiveness of companies.

To survive today’s fierce competitive market; engineering companies must continually design and develop successful new products that have higher quality with lower cost and shorter product introduction lead times. Effective and efficient design processes are crucial in determining the capabilities, costs, and other attributes of products. Such processes depend on the knowledge and creativity of designers and the efficiency with which resources for designing are used. With the change towards whole product lifecycle support and the increase in the knowledge-intensivity and complexity of modern-day design tasks, recording of the information, knowledge, and experiences accumulated in designs is becoming particularly important today, not only for design of new products but also for product lifecycle support. Thus, major challenges for companies include: how to implement an appropriate design process to improve the performance of its products; how to make effective records of the work that is carried out in design activities; how to standardise and automate repetitive work to minimise error and rework in the design process; and how to capture the knowledge embedded in the design process to ensure the sustained competitiveness of a company. To respond to these challenges, various models and techniques for description or planning of design processes (i.e. design process model) have been proposed. Broadly, a process model can be descriptive, prescriptive, or have aspects of both [1]. A descriptive process model attempts to capture tacit knowledge about how work is really done (e.g. IDEFØ [2]). A prescriptive process model tells people what work to do and perhaps also how to do it (e.g. Signposting [3]). Process modelling has achieved considerable success in improving the management of design processes, such as in lead time reduction, task scheduling, and project decomposition [4]. However, there are still a number of limitations need to be overcome [1] and [5], many of which are compounded by limitations in the way that actual design processes are recorded, such as lack of completeness of actual process descriptions, weakly structured and raw records, and poor capture of rationale. Notwithstanding the difficulties in representing process steps, there is considerable value in better representation of design processes. Firstly, individuals and organisations tend to follow similar approaches in their work and learn and adapt through successive execution of processes [6]. Lessons from previous designs also benefit individuals and organisations by avoiding similar failures. Secondly, novice designers especially will benefit from a more complete record of such occurrences. Design processes, including design activities, decisions-made, and corresponding rationale, are currently largely still recorded in text documents (e.g. design reports, meeting minutes) and in some cases may be retained in employees’ memories. It is difficult for novice designers to assimilate and digest processes recorded in text documents, and the employees who carried out the work may not be available. Furthermore, an analysis of information requests from novice designers found that they were aware of their knowledge needs in only 35% of their queries [7]. A useful process model will help designers, especially novice designers, pick up the correct information resources and methods at an early stage and minimise mistakes, false assumptions or incomplete information. Thirdly, better capture of processes will assist especially embodiment design for mature products, e.g. in automotive and aerospace engineering, in which a great deal of work is transactional, involving repetitive information access and manipulation steps. Fourthly, recording design activities in a better structured form will strengthen data traceability and information retrieval. It especially benefits product lifecycle support, for example tracing design rationale from service feedback and understanding the performance envelopes as design intents for a product (e.g. food processing equipment [8]) redesign. Using process modelling ideas, this paper introduces a new method to record transaction elements of the actual design processes undertaken in a design episode. The method, called component-based recording, is used in place of traditional design reports. The proposed method aims to (1) combine documentation and computer interpretable data to record the actual design work that has been done – recording information flow and dependencies, relationships between activities, successful and unsuccessful practices, and so on so that designers and engineers at later stages of the product lifecycle can look back to learn the lessons and continually improve design process; (2) allow routine work to be standardised and where appropriate reused, thereby freeing designers to focus their creativity and innovation on value-adding activities; (3) simplify definition of process model to make the recording of work quicker and easier; (4) allow both bottom-up and top-down recording of the process undertaken by an engineering team as it is carried out, and then browsing and retrieving of the record of the model from different viewpoints according to various users and purposes. The following parts of this paper are organised as follows. Section 2 gives the background of this research, including relevant literature from process modelling; and a brief investigation of design records and design work. Section 3 presents the method of documentation of design records using a component-based model, including the basic framework, the definition of an activity, XML schemas, and a Topic Map approach for organising activity records. Section 4 describes the implementation of the proposed approach with a case study. Finally, Section 5 gives the conclusions and further research discussions.

The growing pressures from global competitive markets signal the inevitable challenge for companies to rapidly design and develop new successful products. To continually improve design quality and efficiency, companies must consider how to speed design processes, minimise human-errors, avoid unnecessary iterations and sustain knowledge embedded in the design process. All of these issues strongly concern one topic: how to make and exploit records of design activities. Traditional design reports cannot satisfy such requirements because they mix design process, rationale, and decision in text documents that are not readily computer interpretable; lack explicit cross-referencing; poorly record rationale; and discourage reuse. Although various process models have been proposed to date, their main purpose is for gaining insight into design dependencies, for decision-making, and for design process management, not for making records of actual design activities. This paper presents a general component-based approach to making records of transactional design activities, based on design a process model idea that aims to continually improve design quality and efficiency, reduce designers’ workload for routine tasks, and sustain competitiveness of companies. In summary, the proposed component-based records have the following advantages: • It captures both top-down and bottom-up design work and has the advantage of recording day-to-day work (e.g. transaction design or embodiment design). The proposed method records design activities that have actually been done, and therefore, the real information flow and dependencies, practices and indeed rework, and iterations are recorded clearly. It allows design information to be retraceable and helps companies in continually improving design. • It shifts design records to design reuse: transaction activities are more about regular approaches and routine work. Thus, the process templates of standardised approaches in the proposed process model help designers to escape repetitive work so as to focus their creativity on value-adding activities. Furthermore, automation and standardisation of regular design approaches can further minimise design errors and speed the design process. • It supports multiple-level re-organisation of information: the activities are individually recorded in XML-based format. XML is not only computer interpretable, but more important it can be assembled, tailored, and transformed in different ways by XSL/XSLT, for example combining existing information to high-level reports and tailoring subsets of the existing information for different users. • It supports to generate various design reports automatically or semi-automatically, and therefore frees designers from report writing and improves design efficiency. The proposed approach records the explicit cross-references (i.e. unique URIs) of information generated/used within the design process. The information required for a design report can be automatically generated with the unique URIs using the programme of XML/XSLT (as mentioned at previous point). Furthermore, the unique URI allows to identification of information dependencies and activity relationship, and the capability of creating information in reusable chunks. • Topic Maps provide a number of important benefits that make their application in this research compelling. Firstly, the Topic Map standard provides facilities to automatically merge different maps and condense identical nodes (those referring to the same information resource) in two separate maps into a single node in the merged map. This is significant when considering that activity records may be created by disparate groups, which must then be amalgamated for purposes of browsing interlinked activities. Secondly, a Topic Map is intended to serve as an abstraction of the underpinning information resources, and hence the underlying information resources may be represented in whatever form necessary to facilitate their processing within an engineering environment. The implementation of the component-based process model is based on a client–server structure and has been realised by Java programming language, DOM, and SOAP. The XSL/XSLT transformation processor for generation of various viewpoints, reports, and a browsing environment has been developed using JavaScript and XSL/XSLT. And the system to convert the XML documents to XTM further treatment as a topic map has been given using JavaScript. The further work will focus on the following issues: • Information capture tools: one of the motivations for the work in this paper is that in future dedicated information capture tools may be used to support the semi-automatic production of documentary records. Some efforts on automatic information capture are being carried out by both academics and the software industry. For example, the Simulation Process Studio (SPS) with UGS NX 3 Simulation [79] provides a palette of standard steps for users to drag and drop into the process with connecting lines defining the flow. The steps can then be saved as an XML file and made available to the standard Unigraphics NX application. Ciflex [80] and the more immersive work conducted within Virtual Reality environments [81] have met with some success in capturing detailed interactions and retrospectively inferring processes or information needs from this captured detail. However, in this work the intent is to capture activities in a more ‘light-weight’ manner, capturing the specific information resources utilised and the manipulations applied within a computational environment. Another active area is automatic rationale capture by recording communication among team members, i.e. Computer-Supported Co-operative Work Tools (CSCW) [55]. For example, ConEditor [82] enables designers to capture and maintain the constraint information generated while designing products. To apply constraint appropriately, the system assumes that users are able to understand the context in which each design constraint is applicable. Janus’s [83] is a system, which has integrated a CAD editor with a rule-based design critic, and an argumentation-structured hypertext documentation environment, so as to ease design knowledge capture [84]. The major problem of Janus’s is how to manage and construct information for different level-scaled tasks and a wide range of problem domains. • As the level of capture is at a highly detailed level, providing some broader depiction of the activities will be necessary to provide a coherent view of the captured design. A long-term intent of this work is to link the captured activities into a high-level process model which has been defined a priori, such that the high-level map not only guides the actual product development and design process but provides some ‘sense-making’ to the detailed records. Efforts are currently underway to conduct a product redesign using the IPPOP project’s PPO core [84], which essentially links high-level activities to a central product representation, and allows key information generated in each activity (such as parameters) to be displayed in a collaborative environment. By capturing the detailed activity in the manner described in this work, it is possible to provide an XSLT report in this collaborative area. • The capture of activity by considering information manipulation is most applicable to those forms of activity where an individual is working within an electronic environment and interacting with addressable resources. Further work has been conducted in looking at capturing different modes of design activity (e.g. learning activities and discursive activities) in representations. Currently, work has been carried out in looking at how synchronous and asynchronous modes of activity in the Computer-Supported Collaborative Working (CSCW) paradigm may be captured and co-ordinated, where the activity model is employed in the asynchronous modes of working [85] and [86].